Earlier this year, Ivanka Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) teamed up to offer a "paid family leave" proposal that consists of workers borrowing from their futures by taking Social Security money out in order to take time off from work to care for family members. Which is not "paid" family leave, it's "borrowed." It came as no surprise that the genesis of the idea was a proposal from the reactionary Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a right-wing nonprofit organization that supposedly focuses on the economic concerns of women.
Since bad ideas that hurt both Social Security and women will never die with Republicans in charge of things, the proposal is getting a Senate hearing this week, ahead of introduction of Rubio's bill. The usual smart policy analysts from the left have pointed out all the bad that could come from the proposal—like people not having enough left in Social Security to live off of or force them to delay retirement in the future. Then there's this problem, too, as pointed out by the Urban Institute: "the program would accelerate by less than a year the projected date on which Social Security’s trust funds run out and the system becomes unable to pay full scheduled benefits."
They also point out that it's women who would bear the most severe consequences because they're likelier than men to take parental leave, and would thus lose more retirement benefits which they can ill afford. Women are already disadvantaged by the Social Security system as a result of spending more time out of the workforce on average and because we're paid so much less.
Interestingly enough, however, the right-leaning American Action Forum (AAF) is also panning the proposal because of the threat it poses to the long-term solvency of the program. "The proposal … would not work so well in practice because of Social Security's troubled financial outlook," Ben Gitis and Gordon Gray wrote in a new report. The extent to which its financial outlook is "troubled" is up for debate, but they're right in that the proposals would have "significant upfront costs" because people would start taking the money out now but wouldn't be delay retirement until decades from now.
It's a bad idea and is just one more scheme from the right to try yet another effort to undermine Social Security and cut benefits. The president of the IWF admits it, on record saying that "once people become used to the ideal of people opting to push back their retirement age, it may become less difficult to gradually raise the normal retirement age," and that this paid leave plan is a first step toward "personal accounts or other substantial Social Security reforms." Enough on the attacks on Social Security from this Republican Congress.
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